Various collaboration systems exist for enabling individuals to engage in collaborate activities, such as working together on projects, sharing information, and the like. Collaboration systems can be particularly useful in allowing geographically dispersed individuals to interact and work with one another. Using various different collaboration systems, or multi-functional collaboration systems, individuals who are geographically remote from one another may, for example, engage in common work projects, for example, using online team work spaces, participate in interactive discussions, for example, using teleconferencing or video conferencing systems, and engage in meetings, for example, using electronic meeting systems that allow for presentations, lectures, seminars, and the like.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications have gained wide acceptance by general Internet users and are increasingly important in the enterprise communications sector. However, achieving voice quality levels for VoIP remains a significant challenge, as IP networks typically do not guarantee non-delay, packet loss, jitter and bandwidth levels. In a VoIP application, voice is digitized and packetized at the sender before its transmission over the IP network to the receiver. At the receiver the packets are decoded and played out to the listener. The process of converting an analogue voice signal to digital is done by an audio “codec”.
Codecs vary in bandwidth required, latency, sample period, frame size and the maximum achieved end user perceived quality, thus different codecs are better suited to different network conditions. Consequently, codec selection techniques have been introduced in VoIP applications in order to make use of the different performance of codecs under different network conditions. However, various considerations in addition to network conditions continue to present challenges to providing acceptable levels of quality of experience for VoIP users.